In Past Show

About Valerie Hegarty

United by a consistent theme of transformation, Valerie Hegarty’s paintings, sculptures, and installations evoke a state of change—falsely ruined canvases and collapsed environments—destroyed if only to be brought to life again. Using foam core, papier-mâché, inkjet prints, and wood, Hegarty has constructed fragile likenesses of historically significant works; her mutation and demolition of the canvases ultimately speaks to greater issues of death, rebirth, and metamorphosis. In an extension of this work, Hegarty’s site-specific installations are the gallery-sized equivalent of her deconstructed paintings. Break-Through Miami (2010) uses Hegarty’s “reverse archaeology” technique—photography, trompe-l’oeil painting, and papier-mâché—to transform a gallery into an illusion of an old, abandoned Miami interior.